Natural disaters and the WORLD,Space,Science,History,Travel

Stuart WILLIAMS,AFP•July 25, 2019In the sweltering French capital, tourists and locals alike made a beeline for fountains

In the sweltering French capital, tourists and locals alike made a beeline for fountains (AFP Photo/Bertrand GUAY) Paris (AFP) – Paris on Thursday baked in an all-time high temperature of 42.6 degrees Celsius (108.7 Fahrenheit) as a ferocious heatwave smashed records across northern Europe, sparking concerns about public health and causing new misery for rail travellers.As records also tumbled in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, Paris beat the previous top of 40.4C set in July 1947.Trains have been slowed in several European countries to avoid damage to the railway networks. French national operator SNCF urged travellers to delay journeys planned for Thursday, while German railway company Deutsche Bahn offered travellers a chance to change tickets free of charge.In the sweltering French capital, authorities warned people to keep an eye on those living alone.At the same time, the scorching weather spelled misery for millions of commuters on public transport.”It’s so hot in the metro, it’s unbearable. There are so many people, no air conditioning and everyone is on top of one other,” said Paris commuter Petra Ulm, 34, a clinical researcher.The heatwave, which was expected to ease up on Friday as rain and thunderstorms move in, again focused public attention on the problems caused by climate change.- ‘Great day on the beach’ -In Britain, temperatures reached 38.1C in Cambridge, only the second time temperatures over 100 Fahrenheit have been recorded in the UK, weather services said. It was still below the UK’s all-time high of 38.5C.Those lucky enough to be by the sea could still enjoy the weather.”It’s obviously not so good for some people, but if you’ve got the day off and young kids then it’s great for a day on the beach,” said Graham Clarke, 50, an insurance agent, enjoying the sands of Broadstairs in southeast England.In the Netherlands, a new high Thursday of 40.4C in the south broke a record dating back to 1944.In Amsterdam, crowds jumped into a central square fountain, while municipal workers sprayed water on bridges over the city’s famed canals to stop metal structures deforming in the heat.”I’m just trying not to move too much,” said Serona Methorst, a 19-year-old Dutch student sitting under a tree with friends. „We are so used to a colder climate, people are really disturbed by this weather.”In the centre of the country, Dutch police jokingly urged criminals not to plan any heists during the heatwave.”It’s tough to work now, not just for you but also for us,” the police posted in a Facebook message. „Stay at home, turn on the air-conditioning.”On Thursday, Germany again hit a national record of 41.5 C in Lingen, western Germany.The Grohnde nuclear plant in western Germany will temporarily shut down on Friday as a way to protect the environment, its operator said. Water used to cool the reactor is poured back into rivers and the shutdown is meant to protect already overheated river ecosystems.Belgium on Thursday also reached a new record high of 40.6 degrees Celsius, on the Kleine-Brogel military base, in northeastern Belgium.Two suspected drug smugglers had to call police in the Belgian port city of Antwerp after becoming trapped in a shipping container filled with cocaine, prosecutors said.- Train disruptions -Eurostar and Thalys rail services from Brussels to London and Paris also experienced major delays and cancellations after a cable failure the day earlier.”I ask everyone who can avoid or delay their journeys to do so,” said French Environment Minister Elisabeth Borne, advising workers who could do their jobs at home not to go to their offices.The northern third of France, including Paris, was under a red alert while the rest of the country had a yellow warning and water-use restrictions were in force.In Austria, a three-year-old child died of dehydration after falling asleep in a car parked in full sunshine at the family farm, local authorities said.- ‘Look after others’ -France remains haunted by the early summer of 2003 when 15,000 deaths were blamed on the heat and the authorities were hit for not mobilising fast enough.”We need to take care of ourselves but above all others, especially those who are alone, and be able to detect the first symptoms of heatstroke,” said Prime Minister Edouard Philippe.Local authorities have placed restrictions on water usage in many areas due to drought-like conditions that have seen ground and river water levels fall dramatically.A June 26-28 blast of heat in France was four degrees Celsius hotter than an equally rare June heatwave would have been in 1900, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) said this month.One study by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology said the deadly weeks-long heatwave across northern Europe in 2018 would have been statistically impossible without climate change.

News

The Latest: Heat damage disrupts train service in England

APTOPIX Belgium Europe Heatwave

A boat sails as sunbathers relax during a hot summer day at the beach in De Haan, Belgium, Thursday, July 25, 2019. Belgium experienced code red, extreme heat warning, on Thursday as temperatures soared during the second heat wave of the summer. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

Britain’s Met Office says the mercury reached 38.1 degrees Celsius (100.6 F) in Cambridge, a July record and only the second time temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit have been recorded in the U.K.

The all-time record of 38.5 degrees Celsius (101 F) was set in August 2003.

___

4:30 p.m.

It was a drug deal that was truly too hot to handle.

Antwerp police said Thursday they arrested two men who had called emergency officials to come rescue them from an overheated container in the port, where they had somehow locked themselves in, allegedly looking for drugs.

Outside, Belgium was blazing through its hottest day ever, with temperatures peaking over 40C (104F) in the shade.

Police said it took two hours to find the container.

Video of the incident showed how one man slumped out of the container and fell to the ground when police finally opened the container. Cocaine was found in the cargo.

The two men were charged with importing drugs and belonging to a criminal organization.

___

4:15 p.m.

The German weather service says a new record temperature of 41.5 degrees Celsius (106.7 degrees Fahrenheit) has been set, breaching the previous high set earlier in the day.

The meteorological service said temperatures had risen Thursday to a new national high in the northern German town of Lingen and that they were expected to climb even higher in the late afternoon.

Wednesday’s record was at 40.5 C (104.9 F) in Geilenkirchen near the Belgian border, the German news agency dpa said.

Across Europe, record temperatures are being set as the continent swelters in its second heat wave this summer.

___

3:55 p.m.

The German Weather service says a new record temperature of 40.6 degrees Celsius (105.1 degrees Fahrenheit) has been set, breaching the previous high set just a day ago.

The meteorological service said temperatures had risen to a new national high in Bonn in western Germany and that they were expected to climb even higher in the late afternoon.

Wednesday’s record was at 40.5 C (104.9 F) in Geilenkirchen near the Belgian border, the German news agency dpa said.

Across Europe, record temperatures are being set as the continent swelters in what is its second heat wave this summer.

___

3:25 p.m.

Belgium has set a new national heat record for the second time in as many days as temperatures shot up to 40.6 degrees Celsius (105.1 Fahrenheit) in the northeast of the country.

David Dehenauw, head of forecasting at the Royal Metereological Institute said „New national record: 40.6 C in Kleine Brogel! Is this for real!”

Temperatures could still shoot higher, since the mark was set in the early afternoon Thursday, with several hours of blasting sunshine to go.

On Wednesday, the Belgian temperature record was set at 40.2 C (104.4 F) in nearby Angleur.

Belgium has kept temperature records since 1833.

___

2.10 p.m.

Britain has recorded its hottest day on record for July, with the mercury climbing to 36.9 degrees Celsius (98 degrees Fahrenheit) at Heathrow Airport.

The conditions come as the country — better known for its often gray and damp conditions — prepared for the possibility of record-breaking temperatures later on Thursday.

The previous July record was 36.7 C (98 F) in 2015, while the all-time record is 38.5 C (101 F) recorded back in August, 2003. Britain’s Met Office said records go back to 1865.

The hot weather is causing problems for the National Health Service.

Dr. Nick Scriven, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, says staff are struggling since many facilities do not have air conditioning.

Scriven says no lessons were learned from earlier heat waves. He says that „last year, hospitals hired in large fans and coolers for a week or so but have got nothing long-term in place.”

The national weather service Meteo France announced that the new record was reached Thursday afternoon, beating the previous record of 40.4 C (104.8 F) in 1947.

It’s one of several records set in this week’s heat wave — the second wave baking the continent this summer.

France saw its hottest-ever day on record last month, when a southern town reached 46 C (114.8 F).

___

12:45 p.m.

A Dutch government health institute is warning of high levels of smog due to ozone in the air in parts of the country as a heat wave bakes Europe.

The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment issued a „smog alarm” Thursday for regions including the densely populated cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague.

The institute says air quality in the some regions will be „extremely bad” because light winds mean that pollution is not being blown away and sunlight transforms it into ozone.

The smog can cause irritation of the eyes, nose and throat, and leave people coughing and short of breath.

The institute warns that the elderly, children and people who already suffer from airway problems are particularly susceptible, and should stay indoors and avoid strenuous physical exertions.

Temperatures in the Netherlands are forecast to climb toward 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) on Thursday.

___

12:15 p.m.

Officials in Belgium say the nation has seen temperatures rise past the 40 C mark for the first time since records were kept in 1833.

The Belgian meteorological institute said on Thursday that the new record now stood at 40.2 C (104.4 F), recorded close to Liege in eastern Belgium’s Angleur on Wednesday.

It had said earlier that the 39.9 C seen in Kleine Brogel was the new national record.

The institute said that the record could well be broken again on Thursday.

___

12 noon

Authorities in Austria say a 2-year-old boy has died of dehydration in the country’s Styria region after he climbed into an overheated parked car without his family noticing and fell asleep in it.

The Austrian news agency APA reported Thursday that the boy, who climbed into a car parked at the family’s farm on Monday, died at a children’s hospital on Wednesday.

The country’s authorities warned Thursday that children and animals can die quickly in closed cars without air conditioning even if the outside temperature is only at 26 degrees Celsius (79 F).

Europe is sweltering in a record-breaking heat wave with temperatures expected to rise to more than 40 C (104 F) in some places.

___

11:30 a.m.

Hot, hotter, hottest! Paris, London and points across Europe are bracing for record temperatures Thursday as the second heat wave this summer bakes the continent.

Climate scientists warn this could become the new normal in many parts of the world. But temperate Europe — where air conditioning is rare — isn’t equipped for the temperatures frying the region this week.

So tourists frolicked in fountains to seek relief and authorities and volunteers fanned out to help the elderly, sick and homeless hit hardest by the heat. Trains were canceled in Britain and France, and French authorities urged travelers to stay home.

On Thursday, the Paris area could be as hot as 42 C (108 F) as a result of hot, dry air coming from northern Africa that’s trapped between cold stormy systems.

Climate records fall as Europe roasts in heatwave

Climate records fall as Europe bakes in heatwave

People cool off during a sunny day at the Rijksmuseum fountain in Amsterdam

PARIS/LONDON (Reuters) – Soaring temperatures broke records in Germany, France, Britain and the Netherlands on Thursday as a heatwave gripped Europe for the second time in a month, in what scientists said were becoming more frequent events as the planet heats up.

As a cauldron of hot air from the Sahara desert moved across the continent, drawn northwards by high pressure, Paris saw its highest temperature since records began and Britain reported its hottest weather for the month of July.

An all-time high was measured in Germany for a second day running, at 41.5 degrees Celsius (106.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in the northwestern town of Lingen – similar temperatures to those in some Gulf Arab capitals on Thursday.

The unusual conditions brought a reduction in French and German nuclear power output, disrupted rail travel in parts of Britain and sent some Europeans, not habitual users of air conditioning in their homes, out to the shops in search of fans.

Health authorities issued warnings to the elderly, especially vulnerable to spikes in temperature. In cities, children splashed about in water fountains to cool off.

„It’s very hot at the moment. I saw 42 degrees (Celsius) is forecast for today,” said 19-year-old French tourist Ombeline Massot in the capital’s Montmartre district, where visitors drank chilled bottles of water and fanned themselves.

The mercury in Paris touched 42.6 C (108.68 F) in mid-afternoon, above the previous Paris record of 40.4 C (104.72 F) recorded in July 1947.

In Britain, the temperature reached its highest for July, hitting 36.9 C (98.42 F), said the Met Office, the national weather service, citing the temperature at Heathrow, London.

In the southern Netherlands, the temperature peaked at 40.4 C (104.7 F), topping 40 C (104 F) for the first time on record, Dutch meteorology institute KNMI said. That broke the national record of 39.3 C set the previous day. Before this week, the national heat record of 38.6 C had stood for 75 years.

The heat is expected to persist until Friday.

GLOBAL WARMING

Climate specialists said such heatwaves are becoming more frequent as a result of global warming from greenhouse gas emissions.

Britons faced travel disruption, with trains being forced to slow down to prevent tracks buckling in the heat. Several train operators asked commuters not to travel or set off very early.

A Met Office study found that a heat wave like one that broke records last year was 30 times more likely to occur than in 1750 because of the high amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Since the pre-industrial period the Earth’s surface temperature has risen by 1 degree Celsius.

„There is a 40-50% chance that this will be the warmest July on record. This heatwave is exactly in line with climate change predictions,” said Dr Karsten Haustein at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.

Peter Inness, senior research fellow at the University of Reading, said: „The fact that so many recent years have had very high summer temperatures both globally and across Europe is very much in line with what we expect from man-made global warming.”

In northern Poland, toxic algae in the Baltic sea led to the closure of more than 15 beaches this summer, authorities said.

„The Baltic sea isn’t the cleanest and when the temperatures are so high, then these organisms multiply at lightning speed and beaches need to be closed,” said Jan Bondar, a spokesman for Poland’s Chief Sanitary Inspectorate.

Very high temperatures across Europe coupled with prolonged dry weather has cut French nuclear power generation by around 5.2 gigawatts (GW) or 8%, French power grid operator RTE’s data showed.

Electricity output was curtailed at six reactors by 0840 GMT on Thursday, while two other reactors were offline, data showed. High water temperatures and sluggish flows limit the ability to use river water to cool reactors.

In Germany, PreussenElektra, the nuclear unit of utility E.ON, said it would take its Grohnde reactor offline on Friday due to high temperatures in the Weser river.

(Reporting by Nina Chestney in London, Richard Lough in Paris, Thomas Escritt in Germany, Alexandra Regida in Brussels and Bart Meijer in Amsterdam, Joanna Plucinska and Agnieszka Barteczko in Warsaw, Editing by William Maclean and Peter Graff)

10 Ways the Weather Affects Your Spending Habits

For those trying to save some dough this summer — or fall or winter — it can pay to understand the psychological traps that emerge when the sun comes out, the clouds turn to rain or when seasons change.

Whether sweltering in the heat or hiding from the rain, people tend to manage money differently depending on the weather. If you want to spend less money, this list can help you figure out how to work with the weather forecast instead of against it.

1. When Updating Your Warm- or Cold-Weather Wardrobe

Summer spending typically starts when the weather turns warm, not necessarily when the calendar hits June 21. Spending on clothing is consistent with weather patterns, reported trade publication Horticulture Week last summer, when it registered a dramatic uptick in apparel spending as temperatures peaked.

Shoppers are often excited by the first wave of warm weather, flocking to the stores in search of wares to update their summer wardrobes. Still, the best way to make your money last might be to keep your excitement at bay and save your shopping for later in the season, according to U.S. News and World Report. The best summer clothing deals can be found from Fourth of July to Labor Day, already well into the heat of the season.

2. As a Response to Extra Hours of Summer Sunlight

A three-part study reported on by Psychology Today found that people feel more positive when the sun is out. That might not be surprising to anyone who’s enjoyed a long walk with a friend on a sunny day. However, those sunny feelings also prompt people to want to shop — and spend — more.

If you know ahead of time that the weather forecast is linked to how often you open your wallet, plan ahead, and arrange a free or inexpensive outing — like a daytrip to the beach or a local park — the next time warm weather strikes. Finding ways to spend less money often depends upon your creativity.

3. When Trying Combat Seasonal Affective Disorder

About a half-million the U.S. population suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, a form of depression that strikes during fall and winter months, when there is less sunlight available each day, according to the Cleveland Clinic. The condition is most prevalent in women, as well as people who live in cloudy regions or far north or south of the equator, where light disparity is at its greatest.

Grant Bledsoe, a Portland, Ore., financial planner and founder of Three Oaks Capital Management, said he has seen this phenomenon firsthand. “I grew up in Alaska, where there’s very little sunlight in the wintertime,” he said. “When we get depressed, we tend to go out and buy stuff to make ourselves feel better.”

Instead of using retail therapy as the cure, the Cleveland Clinic suggested daily 15- to 30-minute morning sessions of light therapy, a treatment that exposes sufferers to an artificial fluorescent light source.

4. When Traveling to Escape to a More Moderate Climate

When it comes to summer vacation, more than two in three travelers spend more money than expected, and almost half accumulate credit card debt while traveling, according to a 2015 summer travel survey released by consumer credit reporting agency Experian.

“Here in the desert, people spend money to stay cool” by traveling to more moderate climates, said Charles C. Scott, accredited investment fiduciary with Pelleton Capital Management in Scottsdale, Ariz. To stay cool in the summer, Scott’s neighbors head to the beach in Southern California or up to the mountains in Northern Arizona, he explained.

That traveling doesn’t always come cheap. The average vacation costs more than $1,000 per person, according to a 2015 survey conducted by American Express and independent marketing firm Ebiquity. Summer is a notoriously expensive time to travel, but those with school-age kids at home have few options. Instead, consider a series of daytrips that don’t require lodging, or pick a place within driving distance to forgo the airfare.

5. When Looking to Beat the Heat

Hot weather spells at home tend to be accompanied by a substantial boost in day-to-day spending, said Andrew McFadden, founder of Panoramic Financial Advice. “In my hometown of Fresno, Calif., we have long summers with 100-plus degree heat,” he said. “That means we’re all cranking up our air conditioners in our homes and in our cars, and we’re buying ice-cold bottled water [and] Starbucks Frappuccinos to keep us cool and happy.”

73-year-old, his dogs rescued after 4 days in remote Oregon

Man Rescued Oregon

This undated photo provided by the Oregon State Police shows a jeep and dog belonging to a 73-year-old man who was found by a mountain biker on July 18, 2019. The 73-year-old man who was stranded in the remote Oregon high desert for four days with his two dogs was rescued when the long-distance mountain biker discovered him near death on a dirt road, authorities said Thursday, July 25. (Oregon State Police via AP)

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A 73-year-old man who was stranded in the remote Oregon high desert for four days with his two dogs was rescued when a long-distance mountain biker discovered him near death on a dirt road, authorities said Thursday.

Gregory Randolph had hiked about 14 miles (22.5 kilometers) with one of his dogs after his Jeep got stuck in a narrow, dry creek bed. He was barely conscious when biker Tomas Quinones found him on July 18.

Quinones, of Portland, hadn’t seen anyone all day as he biked across the so-called Oregon Outback, a sparsely populated expanse of scrub brush and cattle lands in south-central Oregon. At first, he thought the strange lump was a dead cow.

„As I got closer, I thought, ‘That’s a funny looking cow’ and then I realized that this was a man,” he recalled Thursday in a phone interview.

„I started noticing that he sometimes would look at me but his eyes were all over the place, almost rolling into the back of his head. Once I got a better look at him, I could tell that he was in deep trouble.”

Randolph was horribly sunburned, couldn’t talk or sit up, and could barely drink the water Quinones offered him.

Quinones hadn’t had a cellphone signal for two days, so he pressed the „SOS” button on a GPS tracking device he travels with in case of emergency.

He sat with Randolph, unfurling his tent to provide shade as they waited. A dog — a tiny Shih Tzu — emerged from the brush and Quinones fed it peanut butter.

An ambulance showed up more than an hour later and whisked Randolph away, leaving the dog.

A sheriff’s deputy showed up minutes later and, after giving a report, Quinones continued his trip. The deputy took the dog.

But Quinones soon noticed what appeared to be Randolph’s footsteps in the dust and followed them back for four miles until the foot tracks left the road, he said.

When the deputy passed while leaving the area, Quinones pointed out the tracks then continued on.

Oregon State Police said they used an airplane to spot Randolph’s Jeep two days later, on July 20. His second dog had stayed at the site and was also alive.

The dog may have gotten some water from mud puddles in the creek bed, Lake County Deputy Buck Maganzini said.

The Jeep was miles from the nearest paved road, he added. Lake County is nearly 400 miles (644 kilometers) southeast of Portland.

„It’s still there. It very well could stay there forever. I don’t know how he got the Jeep in as far as he did,” Maganzini said.

Randolph spent several nights in a hospital but is now home and recovering, as are his dogs. A home phone listing for him was disconnected.

„He was just out driving the roads — that’s kind of common out here,” Maganzini said. „There’s not a heck of a lot else to do. You see a lot of pretty country.”

Quinones has finished his back-country bike trip and said he feels lucky that he found Randolph when he did — and that he had a way to summon help.

He later discovered it would have been a six-hour ride to the next campsite with cellphone service had he not had his GPS tracking „SOS” device.

„There’s no way to tell how long he’d been collapsed on that road,” he said. „It’s kind of mind-blowing.”

___

Follow Gillian Flaccus on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/gflaccus

Correction: Train Crash story

FILE- This Feb. 4, 2018, file photo shows an aerial view of the site of a fatal train crash between an Amtrak train, bottom right, and a CSX freight train, top left, in Cayce, S.C. Federal officials are meeting to discuss what caused an Amtrak train to divert on to a side track in South Carolina last year and slam into a parked train, killing two crew members and injuring more than 100 passengers. The National Transportation Safety Board is meeting Tuesday, July 23, 2019 in Washington, D.C. (AP Photo/Jeff Blake, File)

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — In a story July 23 about the cause of a February 2018 deadly Amtrak crash in South Carolina, The Associated Press reported erroneously that National Transportation Safety Board member Jennifer Homendy said The Federal Railroad Administration hasn’t done anything about the Positive Train Control system since 2008. Homendy was speaking instead about a different part of the 2008 law concerning rules for railroads in dark territory where there are no track signals. The erroneous quote has been removed.

A corrected version of the story is below:

Deadly 2018 Amtrak crash caused by safety oversights, delays

Federal officials are meeting to discuss what caused an Amtrak train to divert into a side track in South Carolina last year and slam into a parked train, killing two crew members and injuring more than 100 passengers

By JEFFREY COLLINS

Associated Press

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Federal safety officials ruled Tuesday yet another fatal train crash in the United States has been caused by easy-to-fix human errors.

The National Transportation Safety Board determined the crash of an Amtrak train into a parked train on a side track near Columbia, South Carolina, in February 2018 was CSX’s fault. The board blamed the company for failing to implement a safety plan during track upgrades and its engineer for not following specific steps including filling out paperwork to make sure he flipped a switch after parking the train to shift the tracks back to the main line.

The NTSB also ruled years of delays in implementing a safety system called Positive Train Control that would have automatically stopped the Amtrak train before it got to the switched track contributed to the wreck.

NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt said the irony of the South Carolina wreck is that to install the Positive Train Control safety system, workers had to turn off the red and green safety signals train engineers have used for decades to indicate whether train tracks have been turned off the main line.

Automation, training and checklists can all prevent wrecks caused by human errors, said Sumwalt, noting two months earlier he was saying the same thing during a hearing about an Amtrak derailment that killed three people near Seattle. That derailment occurred when an engineer didn’t realize where he was and failed to slow for a curve.

„It is time for railroads to eliminate the possibility of employees failing to perform critical tasks,” Sumwalt said.

The NTSB also made other recommendations to regulators, like adding seatbelts to train seats. Nearly 100 people were injured, many of them thrown from their seats on impact.

CSX agreed its rules and procedures were not followed before the wreck. The company said it changed some of its safety procedures and in the first half of 2019 recorded the fewest train accidents over a six month period in its history. CSX also plans to have Positive Train Control in place, tested and operational where required by the end of 2020, company spokeswoman Cindy Schild said.

„At CSX, every aspect of our operations is governed by rules and procedures designed to safeguard employees, passengers and communities. In this incident, those rules and procedures were not followed, and the results were catastrophic,” Schild said in a statement. It also promised to review the NTSB’s report and recommendations.

The NTSB’s job is to improve safety, and its conclusions cannot be used in court. The board doesn’t dole out punishments and regulators can decide whether or not to follow their recommendations.

The board though spent considerable time at its Washington, D.C., meeting discussing Positive Train Control. Sumwalt said the GPS-based technology would greatly reduce train wrecks. The control system acts as a safety check on humans to slow trains approaching curves too fast or stop engines approaching a switch that isn’t in the right place.

Congress mandated the control system in 2008 after a commuter rail crash killed 28 in California, but several deadlines requiring its installation have been delayed by the Federal Railroad Administration.

The 2018 crash joins a long list of crashes caused by human error that Positive Train Control could have prevented, including eight killed in a 2015 Amtrak crash near Philadelphia caused by a distracted engineer who didn’t slow down and the Seattle crash from December 2017.

South Carolina has its own history of disastrous train wrecks because of parked train crews failing to flip switches back to main tracks. In January 2005, a Norfolk Southern train was directed down a side track and into a parked train with chlorine tankers at a textile mill in Graniteville. The gas leaked, killing nine people.

In the 2018 South Carolina crash, Amtrak engineer Michael Kempf, 54, of Savannah, Georgia, and conductor Michael Cella, 36, of Orange Park, Florida, were killed. Investigators said they did everything they were supposed to in the early hours of Feb. 4, 2018, pulling the emergency brakes as soon as they realized they were heading down the side track.

But they could only slow the train down from 57 mph (92 kph) to 53 mph (85 kph) before impact, according to the train’s instruments.

After the crash, Amtrak required all of its trains passing through tracks without signals to go slow enough to be able to stop if a switch is out of position and report the position of the switch to a dispatcher before continuing.

___

Follow Jeffrey Collins on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JSCollinsAP.

American Airlines passenger smashes laptop on partner’s head in viral clip

An unruly passenger was removed from an American Airlines plane at Miami International Airport Sunday after she smashed a laptop over her partner’s head for allegedly looking at another woman.

The shocking incident was captured on video by another passenger on the Los Angeles-bound flight and was shared on Twitter and YouTube by Julia Scorupco, who was on the plane when the fight broke out. In total, both versions of the clip have racked up nearly 10 million views.

In the viral footage, the woman, identified by police as Tiffany McLemore, can be heard shouting expletives and racist profanities at her partner as she accuses him of ogling another woman on the flight.

„You want to try to f***ing look at other women, n*****?” McLemore yells. „Nah, f*** you! You ain’t gonna look at other women, and you ain’t gonna tell me you’re looking at other women.”

When a flight attendant informs McLemore that there is a small child in the seat behind her, in an attempt to get her to tone down her language, the irate passenger replies, „Yeah I know, I f***ing consoled the f***ing child.”

Scorupco wrote on YouTube that the comment was in reference to another crying baby McLemore apparently helped console on the flight before the altercation.

The flight attendant then asks McLemore to bring her bag to the front of the plane, but she ignores her and continues feuding with her partner, who eventually tells her she is „out of control,” accuses her of assaulting him and stands up to leave the grounded plane.

McLemore grows even more incensed and, following her partner, screams, „Oh, I’m assaulting you? I’m assaulting you?” before allegedly slamming a laptop on his head and punching and shoving him multiple times. The violent act was met with horrified screams and gasps by passengers in the surrounding area.

As flight attendants try to stop her from returning to her seat, McLemore assures them she is only returning to get her purse. On her way off the plane with her belongings, a male flight attendant warns her, „You’re going to get charged with assault.”

„Fine, whatever,” she acknowledges nonchalantly.

Officials with the Miami-Dade Police Department told Yahoo Lifestyle that McLemore, who was on a connecting flight to Los Angeles from Ecuador, walked away after deboarding and that a search for her „yielded negative results.”

They also told the outlet that she didn’t answer her phone and that her partner, who she calls „Memo” in the viral clip, „refused to write a statement and was uncooperative.”

Ryanair Portuguese cabin crew to strike in August – union

DUBLIN (Reuters) – Ryanair <RYA.I> cabin crew in Portugal are set to strike for five days in August in a dispute over pay and conditions, the SNPVAC union said on Wednesday.

The industrial action comes as Ryanair pilots in Ireland and the United Kingdom are holding ballots on a possible strike action in August. SNPVAC said it had not yet decided which days in August it would strike.

Ryanair, Europe’s largest low-cost carrier, suffered a series of damaging strikes last year.

Management say significant progress has been made since, with collective labour agreements concluded with a number of pilot unions throughout Europe.

But SNPVAC said Ryanair has refused to comply with a protocol signed last November, which it said included holiday pay, 22 days of annual leave per year and full compliance with Portuguese parental law.

„Facing the intransigence from Ryanair and the lack of interest of the Portuguese government on guaranteeing the fundamental labour rights to their citizens that work for Ryanair, the cabin crew had no other choice but to return to the industrial conflict,” SNPVAC said in a statement.

Ryanair did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Conor Humphries in Dublin; Editing by G Crosse and Matthew Lewis)